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I think coincidences are cool, even if they don’t mean anything, and who knows? Maybe they do!
So when we left the apartment, it was this doomed unreal feeling I remember more than anything else, like we were bad actors in terrible costumes in a play that was guaranteed to tank, but we had to go out on stage anyhow.
Life is fleeting! Don’t waste a single moment of your precious life! Wake up now! And now! And now!
I don’t envy the anthropologists, trying to make sense of our material culture from all the bright hard nuggets they’ll be digging out of the middens of the future.”
The past is weird. I mean, does it really exist? It feels like it exists, but where is it? And if it did exist but doesn’t now, then where did it go?
It was hopeless, like trying to hold a snowflake on your tongue or a soap bubble between your fingertips. Catching it destroys it, and I felt like I was disappearing, too.
in other words no matter where you are) and you return your mind to zazen, it feels like coming home. Maybe this isn’t a big deal for you, because you’ve always had a home, but for me, who never had a home except for Sunnyvale, which I lost, it’s a very big deal. Zazen is better than a home. Zazen is a home that you can’t ever lose, and I keep doing it because I like that feeling,
What if I travel so far away in my dream that I can’t get back in time to wake up?
Sometimes I think that the spirits of the ancestors live in the breezes, and you can feel them swishing around.
“Ah,” he said. “The pleasure is mine.” His words were thin and blue, curling like the smoke from the burning tip of an incense stick.
“No. Haruki never hated Americans. He hated war. He hated fascism. He hated the government and its bullying politics of imperialism and capitalism and exploitation. He hated the idea of killing people he could not hate.”
She chuckled to herself and wiped her eyes with her crooked old finger. Sometimes when she told stories about the past her eyes would get teary from all the memories she had, but they weren’t tears. She wasn’t crying. They were just the memories, leaking out.
If his medium had been words instead of war, he would have been a poet.
I find myself drawn to literature more now than in the past; not the individual works as much as the idea of literature—the heroic effort and nobility of our human desire to make beauty of our minds—which moves me to tears,
Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being. —Dgen Zenji, Uji
Like her, we must keep up our studies even as civilization collapses around us.
in this tangled world of cause and effect, it is impossible to know.
“To philosophize is to learn to die.”
“To study the Way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by all the myriad things.”
The cherry blossoms on the base have bloomed and fallen, and still I am waiting to share their fate.
Sometimes the mind arrives but the words don’t. Sometimes words arrive but the mind doesn’t.
A spider drops on a silvery thread from the branch overhead. A faint breeze stirs the treetops. Dew and rain cling to the leaves and ferns of the understory. Each drop holds within itself a small, bright moon. Mind and words are time being. Arriving and not-arriving are time being.
Everyone was superhappy because finding the nodobotoke is a good sign. Muji said it’s the most important bone, the one we call an Adam’s apple in English, but in Japanese it’s called the Throat Buddha, because it’s triangular and looks a little bit like the shape of a person sitting zazen. If you can find the Throat Buddha, then the dead person will enter nirvana and return to the ocean of eternal tranquillity. The Throat Buddha is the last bone that goes in, and you put it on the very top, and then they close the urn.
She says the mark of new cool is no hits for your name. No hits is the mark of how deeply unfamous you are, because true freedom comes from being unknown.
have a pretty good memory, but memories are time beings, too, like cherry blossoms or ginkgo leaves; for a while they are beautiful, and then they fade and die.
We know that on account of the measurement problem, the moment you open the box to measure the cat’s state, you will find the cat either dead or alive. Fifty percent of the time the cat will be alive. The other 50 percent of the time, the cat will be dead. Whichever it is, the cat’s state is singular and fixed in time and space. However, before you open the box to measure it, the cat’s state must be smeared and multiple, like the blurred tiger. Due to the quantum principles of entanglement and superposition, until you observe it, the cat must be both dead and alive, at the same time.
Words are like a finger. A finger can point to the moon’s location, but it is not the moon. To see the moon, you must look past the finger. To look for the truth in books, the Sixth Patriarch was saying, is like mistaking the finger for the moon. The moon and the finger are not the same thing.
